Survey of 154 scholars places 45th president behind even ‘historically calamitous chief executives’ linked to civil war
Donald Trump finished 45th and rock bottom of a list ranking US presidents by greatness, trailing even “historically calamitous chief executives” who failed to stop the civil war or botched its aftermath.
Worse for the likely Republican nominee this year, his probable opponent, Joe Biden, debuted at No 14.
“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the political scientists behind the survey, wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Honestly, if you talk to most presidential historians they will tell you that you need about 20 years to pass before you can accurately assess a president. There’s too many unknowns that will come to light only years or decades after a term ends, Eisenhower is a great example of this. So these rankings are likely to change over the years.
Although, having seen Trump’s predilection for fraud, decit, and self-serving, I’d be shocked if he rebounds as more information comes out.
In 20 years, we could be up to 48 presidents or more, so you’re right, trump’s rating could get even lower. Hopefully no one beats him.
In 20 years, the number of presidents might not have increased.
In his eyes that’s called winning.
Also, Fuck Putin, that horrible man.
Can you elaborate on Eisenhower, please?
Eisenhower was always seen as aloof, sort of a figurehead, during his presidency. However, years after, once his papers were made public, a much different view of Eisenhower started to take shape. He was seen more as a hands-on leader. I believe he was in the 15-20th range in the 80s, but by 2000 was up to 9th, and recently up to 5th (8th in current poll).
Here’s a preview of a journal article that touches on it a bit.
He can’t drop any further
Not yet anyway. Let’s hope we don’t reach a time when there’s a debate whether someone deserves the spot instead of Trump.
I dunno, perhaps they should change the ranking to throw in some additional items like foot fungus, head lice, 2nd-hand dog vomit and such… and then Trump would remain in last place!? :-P
I would have put Reagan way further down the list.
The problem is how many objectively bad presidents we’ve had. I agree, however, Reagan should be lower.
I’m a little mixed on this. I do think he should be lower on the rankings due to a lot of his shitty policies.
However, he has also done some significant differences that still affect us today. He did make GPS globally available to the public at no cost. Could you imagine having to pay to use your GPS every time, or not having GPS available to you at all unless you were in the military?
People who should be lower: Jackson, Wilson, and Reagan. Fuck those guys.
Reagan can be next to last. He’s done more damage to modern America than all others but Trump
Except Republicans were polled as well, and then the rankings combined, whereas e.g. Trump is more universally hated by all sides (independents too).
He was tough on the USSR, at least. Obama and Biden not arming Ukraine enough before the conflicts caused Russia to be more successful than it has any right to be
Obama tried, they passed multiple aid packages. Trump withheld the aid, which was the cause of his first impeachment.
Obama could have directly slapped Russia down in 2014, but didn’t do shit. Russia was not punished enough and got more bold in 2022
Why is it Obama or Biden’s responsibility to arm a foreign country?
Because the US disarmed Ukraine in exchange for security promises. Time to actually live up to your promises
Russia guaranteed Ukraine security for disarmament, the UK and US made assurances.
Well, it’s still shitty since everyone bullied Ukraine to disarm and then Russia invaded and the arm shipments are not enough to stop Russia from continuing to take land
Iran and North Korea are better allies than the US and that sucks for global diplomacy
oh so why don’t we ACTUALLY DEFEND instead of just sending fuck tons of money are arms? like i said, this shit could be over tomorrow if anyone really wanted it to be. to many people are making too much money off of it. war is good for business incase you haven’t noticed.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t, I’m saying it’s better to send arms than not to send them
Trump’s so much worse than any of those guys. He’s literally promising to end democracy in the USA and to imprison his political opponents if he wins the next election. None of those others went that far.
Not to mention him being convicted of massive fraud while in office and fomenting a riot against the capitol to try to prevent the democratic election process from occurring. I mean this stuff is absolutely nuts and unlike anything any other president has done.
Jackson committed genocide against native Americans, so I think that’s worse.
I could go on and on about all of Jackson’s atrocities from stealing babies to skinning Native people alive to make bridle reins. But I think it’s enough to say that Jackson was Hitlers wet dream. He quoted him often and even ripped off Jackson’s speech called the Final Solution to the Indian Problem. Yea, Jackson goes last even over Trump.
jackson not being dead last just completely ruins the entire integrity of the list. how can genocide against native americans be better than trump? seriously?
I mentioned in a comment a bit further up but thought I’d offer it here too:
Trump also committed genocide against poor people by lying to them that a global pandemic was not airborne, when it actually was. In the Bob Woodsworth interview, he admitted it. In advance. He KNEW, and he did it anyway.
Plus he led a coup to overthrow the nation so… there’s that too.
that’s worse than literal genocide of an entire race of people? do you really think so?
Not necessarily, but my point was to try and guess what they may have been considering. And if the absolute number of people killed is larger… that could have swayed their thinking there.
Also, you expect more from adults - so if we really have learned from our history and thus are more culturally experienced now vs. hundreds of years ago, then is killing people nowadays “worse” or “better” than to do so back then? It’s really quite a shitty situation that we are in, and my main point is that it it not like we are comparing genocide to no genocide, but rather one form of genocide vs. another form of genocide.
And yet… at the risk of offending you further, an argument can be made that indeed killing your OWN PEOPLE really is on a somewhat different level, as far as genocide is concerned, than killing the OTHER, outside-of-group people.
Not that any of this is remotely “good”, when we are comparing dead last to second to dead last. But… it is somewhat understandable I mean, that the entire list may not need to be thrown out, just b/c the two last places both have genocidal people in them, but with whichever one or the other happens to be one rank higher or lower. :-(
That is Trump’s favorite president unsurprisingly.
Yeah honestly I fucking hate Trump but Jackson should be the worst simply because of this. This kind of voids the entire reputation of these scholars in my view.
Trump also committed genocide against poor people by lying to them that a global pandemic was not airborne, when it actually was. In the Bob Woodsworth interview, he admitted it. In advance. He KNEW, and he did it anyway.
Plus he led a coup to overthrow the nation so… there’s that too.
I think part of the problem is intent versus what he got done so far.
If you want some ammunition in your statement though, add in the bungling of COVID and his anti-vax leadership he probably killed at least a couple hundred thousand Americans.
can they just be tied for last?
FDR should be much much lower
Because of the internment camps?
Yes, and agricultural adjustment act. Bribing voters with social security. Attempted court packing. Support of Mussolini. Created UNICOR. Corporatism. To name just a few things.
“Being a traitor to his class, and empowering peasants.” Fixed that for you.
Fuck Ben Shapiro.
“Being a traitor to his class, and empowering peasants.” Fixed that for you.
Yeah no that’s not what I said. He actually empowered corporate technocrats more.
Fuck Ben Shapiro.
I’m confused.
A great president is one who expanded the institution of the president,
Yea, I don’t know if this definition of greatness is very good
Hahaha at Vaughn and Rottinghaus low-key throwing shade at Biden. Let’s look at their quote closely:
Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump,
translation: his greatest achievement has been not being Trump
resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership,
than Trump (of course)
and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,”
Predicted greatest legacy in the hopefully remaining four years: Be re-elected. Lol
Man i dunno if it was on purpose to basically reduce his legacy to “better than nothing” but they certainly stopped well short of praise, didn’t they?
It’s not just being not Trump. But he beat Trump. That’s like stopping a forest fire from taking out the west coast and calling it “not burning trees.”
In 2009, the nobel peace prize was given to someone for not being Bush. Same difference here.
And that guy did drone strikes on civilians…
(Yes, I voted for him twice)
I’d vote for him again too.
basically that’s why he was elected. he wasn’t trump. That’s his whole platform, that’s it. It’s not necessarily a bad platform, but it’s not really gonna leave much, as far as his legacy is concerned.
he wasn’t trump. That’s his whole platform, that’s it.
Sorry, but this is one of those hyperbolic, uninformed, useless hot takes the Internet LOVES. You can literally look up his platform online, like so many places.
Here’s Politifact tracking 99 of his campaign promises.
27 kept 5 compromised 1 broken 31 stalled 34 in the worksI love these comments. Required the absolute minimum amount of work/“research” and yet utterly devastating and unrefutable response.
inseet honest work doing my part memes
From now on whenever I hear him or someone else reference him as 45, I’m going to remember that what they really mean is that he’s at the bottom of all time presidents in the rankings, solidly at 45th place.
Every 4-8 years we can shift his number down by 1
The worst SO FAR
Trump II: electric boogaloo
The real takeaway is that America has had like three presidents that were good across centuries. The rest are pretty dogshit.
Sorry, the rapist elector fraud is getting a bad score?
We can go dumber.
Hold our meth
Read this as Biden being 14th worst, not the best headline :p Kinda impossible to rank them especially when either one could have another term still…
They each already had one term, so they would be ranked based on that partial data, even if those rankings would get changed later after a second.
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considered responses from 154 scholars, most connected to the American Political Science Association
They did not poll the general public, only people who read books - and even write them - literally for a living.
How is this remotely plausible as news
By being something you didn’t know before. Kinda the definition. Yes we knew Trump was absolutely shit but that’s not exactly a rigorously tested hypothesis
Because it reinforces our existing beliefs. Thus, it gets clicks.
Obama seems too high? Other than being a relief after Bush2, what did he do? Just ACA?
His achievements were a lot more covert since republican opposition left him doing most of his work via EO.
One thing he did was a small program that allowed poor folks to get cell phone access.
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